Photograph by: Mark van Manen
, Vancouver Sun

My back lawn is planted in two inches of sand on top of glacial hardpan, a mix of fine sand and gravel as tough as concrete. It is not a great spot for vegetable production.

Or it wasn't until I started nailing together boxes made of 2x12s and filling them with dirt. You can plonk this unit right on top of the lawn and start harvesting salad within two weeks.

You need:

- 4 10-foot lengths of 2x12.

- 3 12-foot lengths of 2x6.

- 2 yards of top soil.

- 1 roll of 36-foot landscape fabric (the cheap stuff is fine).

- A few trays of bedding plants from the nursery.

If you don't have scrap lumber sitting around your yard, hit the building supply store. You want plain spruce planks. They are cheap. Do not buy pressure-treated lumber as it contains poisons that leach into the soil. If you are flush with cash you can make boxes with cedar, but the whole point of this project is that it can be done very cheaply.

Get out the Weed Whacker and scalp the lawn right down to the ground over the entire area of your new garden space. Nail or screw together your 2x12 planks to form a square. I also use 1/2-inch bands of galvanized steel to reinforce the corners, but it isn't strictly necessary.

Cut four lengths of landscape fabric and lay them down inside the box overlapping each other about four to six inches and make sure to tuck the edges under the sides of the wooden box.

Cut the 2x6 planks into three-foot lengths (or have it done at the building supply yard; they often custom cut for no charge). Nail the planks together into rectangles. They won't be perfectly square, but just make sure to put each together exactly the same way so you can stack them.

Place the rectangles one of top of the other in the middle of your big box. Put about two or three inches of gravel in the bottom of the box and place a square of landscape fabric in the box making sure to cover all the gravel.

This deep centrepiece is nice for a cascading herb garden or vines such as cucumbers or squash, which have deep taproots.

This structure will take about two yards of soil to fill. If you can pull a pickup truck right up to the box, do it. Otherwise make friends with your wheelbarrow. (It's around the side of the house, right where you left it three years ago.)

I promised you this rig would pay for itself. Your lumber bill (if you didn't scavenge) is about $90. Your soil costs about $100. You can easily grow $400 to $600 worth of food this summer. Your final investment at the garden centre will be about $30.

Here's my starter kit for a fast food garden:

- Two trays of six leaf lettuce plants.

- Two cucumber vines.

- One zucchini vine.

- One squash vine.

- Two tomato vines.

- One pot of basil.

- One pot of parsley.

- One pot of oregano.

- Whatever else strikes you as tasty.

- A few seed packets including mesclun mix, spinach and kale.

When you plant make sure to "mud in" the roots with plenty of water. First-time garden soil is usually fertile enough for the plants in my list, but a handful of complete organic fertilizer worked in to the soil under each plant will improve your yield. The recipe for home-mixed organic fertilizer is on my blog.

I have pledged to eat something I grew myself every day for a year. This is day 253. Read how I've been doing at The Green Man Blog vancouversun.com/randyshore.

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